Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 27 November, 2007 under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
Before Google appeared, too many a times, we have searched for something and something absolutely unexpected would appear on the web browser. Even though Google has made our life much better but it will delivers the unexpected information once in a while. Some might say that the search string was wrong or a whole range of reasons but ultimately this is not what the consumer wants. We want it now and we want it right.
So even though mashups, social networking and web 2.0 are all great ideas but once everyone gets onto the bandwagon, it becomes too much data to go through and people will get sick of the information overload – my RSS reader has hundreds of unread articles at the moment! We must understand that the final audience/consumer of technology are humans, it doesn’t mean that as technology becomes better, humans would be able to process more information. We are still fundamentally the same human thousands of years ago. We are only capable of certain tasks to some extent.
Therefore for any of enterprise 2.0 initiatives to work, organisation must be able to deliver the right information to the right user at the right time… Easier said than done. Google, web 2.0 has certainly made life better but there is much more to be done in this space. We must be able to profile the consumer so well that we can deliver whatever he/she wants. Searching is the key and Google is doing a good job! Keep it up.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 22 November, 2007 under Enterprise 2.0 |
My experience with working in government agencies previously was a eye-opener. Everyone was relaxed, happy and takes things at their own stride or their own sweet time. There is no rush to complete anything or accomplish much. It almost seems like working in the government sector is almost like a lifestyle, mindset or a kind of personal belief. Employees at my current client is similar in this way too. It used to be a government agency and it got privatised many years ago but work habits are still very much the same as the government sector. (I am not saying all government agencies are like that. The above is just my experience and I might be very wrong in some cases)
Enterprise 2.0 is a ideology that requires a fair amount of proactive human participation. It would work very well when everyone is willing to share knowledge, contribute to the online community and do their part well at work. But in the case of the above, how would enterprise 2.0 work? Even with enterprise 2.0 installed and implemented at the work place, the technology might make life better for employees and increase efficiency by a small margin but the promises that Enterprise 2.0 would never be achieved. The more I think about enterprise 2.0, the more I think it is a workplace revolution.
Anyone has any thoughts on this topic? I would like to discuss this further.
Thanks!
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 20 November, 2007 under Web 2.0 |
Flux beta is an interesting new technology that enables social media distribution to social networking sites by anyone – whether you are a individual blogger or multi-national media companies. Currently only fShare has been released and it allows users to deliver blog posts, videos, and photos to your favourite social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace or Friendster.
However, when Flux is fully released in Dec. It will allow companies to deliver content and applications with greater control and customisation to all popular social networking sites from one place.
This creates a brand new advertising channel where organisations can reach out to the millions of people on social networking sites all from one place. Flux is still in its infancy stage and I will follow up more on this story in future. Check out their website.
Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 19 November, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Web 2.0 |
No matter what enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 or collaboration technologies promises, quality data is of utmost importance for success. Many knowledge workers are constantly swarmed with emails, tasks, meetings and deadlines. Therefore in order for knowledge workers to contribute to Wikis, update documentation or websites, that would mean that they either need to forgo some work they are tasked to complete or stay back at work later. The technologies above allow people to connect to each other much easier through wikis, social networks or mash ups but the underlying driver is that data is brought to the end user is faster and of high quality. Therefore, people must maintain the dataset well.
Organisations can achieve the stipulated promises of such technologies in two steps. Firstly, employers must evangelise the benefits of sharing information and provide some level of incentive for employees to contribute knowledge. Some examples of incentive can be: using a public ranking system on the quality of the information delivered or providing feedback and evaluation from management.
Secondly, an analysis and management of data within the organisation. Implicit data is extremely powerful, it can tell you things from demographics of customers which can in turn determine your marketing strategy to analysis of the bottleneck within the business processes. If anyone has done reporting and analytics in a large organisation, you would know that extracting implicit data can be a tedious and difficult job. This issue can be solved by using Mike2.0 information management methodology.
Mike2.0 provides a open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management that provides an organising framework for information management. This allows organisations better control and deliver their information to end users and it covers both implicit and explicit knowledge.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 18 November, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
I have always been extremely interested in high performing teams in general. I would like to know what is their success story, how they did it, what were the contributing factors and what were the tools they used (if any). Today, while reading some articles online, it dawned upon me that there are still many workplaces operating in a highly structured and controlled manner. To give one extreme example, there are workplaces which uses the time logging system and tracks when you arrive at work, when you leave for lunch, when you return to office and when you go home. In one story I read, an organisation even tracks the amount of time each employee spends at the bathroom.
We have left the era of industrial revolution where workers are highly skilled in only one specific area (e.g. screwing the car door to its body) and nothing else. Those were the days where the workplace was a highly controlled environment and everyone just did their specific small job scope and nothing else. We are currently in the era of knowledge workers who can think, decide and follow up on their own responsibilities and actions. Knowledge workers nowadays do not have a small job scope but is responsible for many different areas of work. However not all organisations are treating their employees like knowledge workers.
In order for Enterprise 2.0 to succeed, the workplace culture and environment must embrace such forms of activities. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. Definition from Enterprise2Conf.
Employers must liberate their workforce and allow people to contribute and be responsible for what they say. HR must employ people that fit into this sort of work environment and employees themselves must have the mentality that sharing of information does not mean that they lose competitiveness but gaining recognition for contributing and sharing. This is a whole new mindset and people need to adopt quickly.
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 17 November, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
I was speaking to a friend who works as an accountant for a mid-size company and he was telling me how the FAQ he had setup became a hit within his company’s intranet. Within his FAQ, he consolidated from various public and private data sources about their clients, names of client to contact for various issues, likes and dislikes of client (he even included things like “Becareful of XXX he has a really bad breath) to many other sensitive information about their clients.
To me, he definitely had created his own version of Wikipedia. Before he knew it, his company have stepped into the shallow waters of Enterprise 2.0. His colleagues were giving input about their clients and updating client specific information. With the release of freely available information people had access to a single point of truth which is constantly updated by dedicated team members. People from his office and regional offices would check out his FAQ before contacting their client providing them with useful information.
Enterprise 2.0 is moving into work places faster than you think. Teams nowadays is not just made up of the immediate colleagues sitting around you in your office but also the colleagues in the regional offices and even global offices. The world is getting flatter and creating a strong united team and allowing the freedom of knowledge is the only way to be highly flexible in this competitive market.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 16 November, 2007 under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, software |
Many would know something about feed aggregators but we have so many of them around at the moment. Say if you are a iGoogle, live.com, De.li.cious, etc member, you have some serious work to get down to just to view stuff that you are interested in. Unless you are capable web-savvy netizen, its hard for you to be able to aggregate all these information to one place and read it from one screen.
Yahoo Pipes have solved this problem. In a nutshell, described by Tim O’Reilly, “it’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.” If you have noticed, its a drag and drop editor – no programming required.
I have created a simple pipe by watching the demo. There is a whole lot of operators and functions you can use and not just filtering the information but also do mathematical calculations, union some sites, filter information, location builder and have your own user inputs. After you have done this, save it as RSS, ATOM, JSON, XML and you can use it for yourself or publish it to the WWW or popular search engines.
This is a good example of mashups with ability to improve the quality of the mashed data and it brings mashups to a whole new level.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 15 November, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
This blog is dedicated to technology specifically in the area of collaboration between any two parties of people or systems. Some of the technologies that surround this topic include Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and application mashups.
Most, if not all, will agree that technology has changed the way we live in some way or another. Even for the poorest people in the world, for example, with the advent of internet, news travel much faster as compared to 50 years ago. We can now react to a call for help or disaster much faster, donate money online and receive RSS feeds of the latest breaking news. However, the basic theories of life still stays the same, we still communicate with people face to face, go out for beers after work on Fridays, businesses’ main aim is to make money and humans are after all humans. I will be applying some traditional theories (e.g. game theory and chaos theory) to analyse and pen my thoughts on this blog.
We are constantly looking to improve and simplify our lives and the situation we are in and this blog is dedicated to do that using technology. I would use this channel to pen down my humble thoughts and hope that all who are reading this will enjoy it.
